A believer is a bird in a cage, a freethinker is an eagle parting the clouds with tireless wing.

Robert Green Ingersoll

They were Presbyterians, the judge was a freethinker.

Mark Twain -- Pudd’n’head Wilson

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Your tendency toward freethinking is what ultimately determined that you are the Final Candidate.

James Dashner -- The Death Cure

There are conformists and freethinkers.

Gayle Forman -- If I Stay

My mother said the Marez clan was full of freethinkers, which was a blasphemy to her, but my father only laughed.

Rudolfo Anaya -- Bless Me, Ultima

She was an oddball, a freethinker, and stubbornly independent, too.

Nicholas Sparks -- The Last Song

The man was a freethinker and could speak his mind.

Dan Brown -- Angels & Demons

Malleus Maleficarum—or The Witches’ Hammer—indoctrinated the world to "the dangers of freethinking women" and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture, and destroy them.

Dan Brown -- The Da Vinci Code

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He claims to be a freethinker— Voices (in murmurs of astonishment).

Henrik Ibsen -- An Enemy of the People

’Because, my boy, as far as my observations go, the only freethinkers among women are frights.’

Ivan Turgenev -- Fathers and Sons

I aint no freethinker, but I’ll tell you what.

Cormac McCarthy -- All the Pretty Horses

In A Room with a View (1908), for instance, Lucy Honeychurch travels to Florence, where she sheds much of her racially inherited stiffness while losing her heart to George Emerson, the freethinking son of an elderly radical.

Thomas C. Foster -- How to Read Literature Like a Professor

A Liberal of the forties and fifties, a freethinker and atheist, he may have been led on by boredom or the hope of frivolous diversion.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky -- The Brothers Karamazov

He was president of the Freethinkers’ Society, and Pudd’nhead Wilson was the other member.

Mark Twain -- Pudd’nhead Wilson

My arguments perverted some others, particularly Collins and Ralph; but, each of them having afterwards wrong’d me greatly without the least compunction, and recollecting Keith’s conduct towards me (who was another freethinker), and my own towards Vernon and Miss Read, which at times gave me great trouble, I began to suspect that this doctrine, tho’ it might be true, was not very useful.

Benjamin Franklin -- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

No: she was a freethinker.

George Bernard Shaw -- Man And Superman

I had the honor of telling your countrymen about that great poet and freethinker once his life had drawn to a close.

Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain

And a fellow from down there was telling me Arrowsmith is great on books and study, but he’s a freethinker—never goes to church.

Sinclair Lewis -- Arrowsmith

To all this her mother replied that Alexandra was a freethinker, and that all this was due to that "cursed woman’s rights question."

Fyodor Dostoyevsky -- The Idiot

Hence it follows of necessity, that vast numbers of our people are compelled to seek their livelihood by begging, robbing, stealing, cheating, pimping, flattering, suborning, forswearing, forging, gaming, lying, fawning, hectoring, voting, scribbling, star-gazing, poisoning, whoring, canting, libelling, freethinking, and the like occupations:" every one of which terms I was at much pains to make him understand.

Jonathan Swift -- Gulliver’s Travels

They were Presbyterians, the judge was a freethinker.

Mark Twain -- Pudd’nhead Wilson

And he told them all about his several dignities, and how he had held this and that and the other place of honor or profit, and had once been to the legislature, and was now president of the Society of Freethinkers.

Mark Twain -- Pudd’nhead Wilson

Judge Driscoll could be a freethinker and still hold his place in society because he was the person of most consequence to the community, and therefore could venture to go his own way and follow out his own notions.

Mark Twain -- Pudd’nhead Wilson

’Why are you unwilling to allow freethinking in women?’ he said in a low voice.

Ivan Turgenev -- Fathers and Sons

It seems to me you have to be clear about these two intellectual directions, or dispositions, as they might more accurately be called—the religious and the freethinking.

Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain

Although Driscoll was a freethinker and Howard a strong and determined Presbyterian, their warm intimacy suffered no impairment in consequence.

Mark Twain -- Pudd’nhead Wilson

Six months before his death, when he was seventeen, he made friends with a political exile who had been banished from Moscow to our town for freethinking, and led a solitary existence there.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky -- The Brothers Karamazov

They both have their good points, but what I particularly have against the freethinking one—the Settembrinian one, I mean—is that it assumes that only it truly represents human dignity.

Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain

And then there was caustic little Naphta, who was bound to strict vows—and such a freethinker that he came close to being a libertine himself, making the Italian look like the dupe of virtue, so to speak.

Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain

In its own way, the other contains a great deal of human dignity, too, and contributes to moral conduct and decorum and noble formality, certainly more than ’freethinking’ does—and always with an eye to human weakness and frailty.

Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain

By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had become a freethinker.

Cormac McCarthy -- All the Pretty Horses

Of those visitors, many had been men of high rank and learning, some even freethinkers, attracted by curiosity, but all without exception had shown the profoundest reverence and delicacy, for here there was no question of money, but only, on the one side love and kindness, and on the other penitence and eager desire to decide some spiritual problem or crisis.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky -- The Brothers Karamazov

Freethinker, did he say?

Henrik Ibsen -- An Enemy of the People

Is Hovstad a freethinker?

Henrik Ibsen -- An Enemy of the People

Let us say it is I that am the freethinker, then.

Henrik Ibsen -- An Enemy of the People

Silence and obedience! I never would have thought that a freethinker like Settembrini could submit to such blatantly Spanish requirements and vows.

Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain

And matters were no less confusing when it came to "objective reality" and the "self"—indeed, the confusion here, which was in fact always the same confusion, was so hopeless and literally confused that no one knew any longer who was the devout soul and who the freethinker.

Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain

I am speaking in generalities, but you will know how to apply my words to those humanitarian freethinkers, who believe themselves to be heroes still standing up against authority and domination.

Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain

Banal freethinkers would have had reason to think so, It was a time when our own priests wanted to breathe the spirit of Catholic hierarchy into Freemasonry, and there was even a flourishing Jesuit lodge at Clermont, in France.

Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain

No, he does not like to recall that there was a time when his society was the object of all the antipathies that freethinkers, atheists, and rationalistic encyclopedists usually reserve for the Church, Catholicism, monks, and the Middle Ages.

Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain

And there you had the central dogma of atheistic freethinkers and their pseudo-religion, which presumed to abolish the Book of Genesis and replace it with a stultifying fable of enlightened knowledge, as if Haeckel had been present at the creation of the earth.

Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain

…behind Naphta’s back in tones of pathos-laden admonition about the Jesuit, as if he were somehow diabolic, Naphta made unperturbed fun of the other man and the sphere he came from, suggesting that the whole thing was terribly old-fashioned and backward, an attempt at bourgeois enlightenment perpetrated by yesterday’s freethinkers, when in fact it was nothing more than a wretched intellectual mirage, which its self-deluded adherents ludicrously believed was full of revolutionary life.